"Angel Reapers"
Martha Clarke, Alfred Uhry
The Joyce Theater
New York N.Y.
November 30, 2011
By Carol Pardo
Copyright ©2011 by Carol Pardo
Most people know the Shakers through their furniture, based on an aesthetic that blends simplicity and refinement into serenity. Dance makers are more aware of the Shakers use of movement as an expression of faith. Martha Clarke, who in previous works has combined the lurid, the baroque, and the naked, makes use of the first two, but focuses on the strains and vulnerabilities generated by the Shakers’ vow of celibacy.
The lights come up on a community at worship. An aisle separates six women and five men seated on slat-back chairs facing upstage. Eventually, one man turns his chair ninety degrees to face the women opposite, the first frayed thread in a taut social fabric. Snapshots of the group, mixed with testimony and biography, follow as we are introduced to Mother Ann Lee, who brought the Shakers to America, and her flock, among them a French immigrant, an abused wife, and a runaway slave. The Shakers are tolerant of who might be outcasts elsewhere—as long as the rules are undisturbed. But there is a worm in the apple or a snake in the grass, the same one that bedeviled Adam and Eve, with the same results. Two orphans raised by the Shakers—the only members of the tribe who have not chosen to be there—succumb to the lure of the flesh and are cast out. The Shakers, tensions intact, survive. At the curtain Mother Ann is seated in profile, humming to herself.
"Angel Reapers" is at its best when expressing the intersection of religious fervor, sexual heat and violence. The juxtaposition of six men and five women communicates clearly that the Shaker community is not Noah’s Ark. Pairing off is undesirable. Duets, by their form alone, are transgressive. The violence of a standing woman pitilessly rotating another wrapped at her feet like a demented axle forcing a wheel to turn is harrowing. The women’s signature jump seems to depart the ground and hang, not too high but unaided, in the air before returning to earth, a mirror of faith striving for transcendence but dragged back to the earthly realm. Sometimes dance is unnecessary. Three cracks of a whip reverberate through The Joyce to explain why the escaped slave had joined the Shakers.
The costumes and lighting find a happy medium between Shaker and contemporary tastes. The music, traditional Shaker songs arranged but sung a cappella, as originally intended, is stirring. Nonetheless, "Angel Reapers" is a wan seventy minutes at the dance theater, for several reasons. Placed late in the show, a striking pas de deux for two men, blending wrestling and contact improvisation, doesn’t tell us anything new, beyond the fact that a duet is an equal opportunity transgression. Two episodes of nudity are limiting rather than powerful. The woman’s bodice ripped open, the two orphans give in to temptation under a spotlight at center stage as the rest of the cast circles madly around them. It’s a striking visual image, but the girl’s unbound hair falling free carries a more durable message; she returns later, clothed, shunned, pregnant, her hair still loose. Later, the four remaining men, naked from socks to hats, dance out their frustrations, Mother Lee’s nightmare come to life. But their dance is reined in by the need to avoid full frontal anything. Uhry’s text, taken from Shaker sources and of his own invention, suffers from its uneven delivery. Momentum dies with every word. Less tangible, but more damaging, is the discomfort of condescension not quite vanquished. In an era where sex is a major marketing tool, the tensions of abstinence can seem quaint at best. "Angel Reapers" resembles a faded diorama viewed through scarred Plexiglass.
